Linux Archive

A cell phone rings in the middle of Mark VandenBrink's presentation. He tells the audience member, "Go ahead and answer it -- I'm a phone guy, so please, leave your phones on! It's better for me." VandenBrink, Motorola's director of mobile devices software, delivered a talk on his company's experiences in the Linux-powered mobile device arena at LinuxWorld Tuesday morning, outlining what the company has learned from its first generation of Linux phones and the changes Motorola plans for the next. Note: Expect tomorrow a review of the A780 Linux phone here at OSNews.

"The biggest barrier to Linux business desktop adoption is Linux itself, as too many distributions make it harder for developers to port to or create applications for Linux, according to John Cherry, initiative manager for Desktop Linux at Open Source Development Labs. OSDL is a nonprofit corporation that supports Linux developers and users. There's a good opportunity today for Linux desktops to attract knowledge workers, but more applications are needed, said Cherry."

The One Laptop Per Child organization will use Linux on its inexpensive machines, but the operating system suffers the same code bloat as Windows, the project's leader said Tuesday. My Take: A few months ago I blogged about this as if I knew what was coming. I still believe that the $100-laptop project should be targetted as an embedded application and so Qtopia with ARM is a better/cheaper/faster solution than Fedora/RHEL with x86. If Palm is able to sell the Zire 22 at $99 and still make lots of profit (yes, they do), then it is probably feasible to manufacture and market my suggestion at $100.

A review of RR64 Linux, a distribution based on Gentoo with Xgl included. "While I will probably never move completely away from the Debian system, I think I have found a winner in RR64. I get along quite nicely with the Gentoo portage system, and I have found the Gentoo community extremely helpful and the documentation both on the DVD and online to be extensive and answer all questions I have had very clearly and concisely."

Abraham Lincoln once said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Apparently, Tuttle, OK city manager Jerry Taylor never got the memo. Barely a week after his humiliating brush with celebrity after the CentOS fiasco, Taylor has definitively proven that arrogance and ignorance make a humorous combo. The Tuttle Times covers the embarassing incident, along with Taylor's gotta-see-it-to-believe-it response.

"In any Linux distribution, some services are enabled to start at boot up by default. For example, on my machine, I have pcmcia, cron daemon, postfix mail transport agent, just to name a few, which start during boot up. Usually, it is prudent to disable all services that are not needed as they are potential security risks and also they unnecessarily waste hardware resources. For example, my machine does not have any pcmcia cards so I can safely disable it. Same is the case with postfix which is also not used. So how do you disable these services so that they are not started at boot time?"

As Novell re-introduces its Linux desktop, more open source advocates are beginning to believe that the call for widespread Linux desktop adoption is leaving the realm of zealotry and entering the mainstream. Whether this will be a watershed moment for the Linux desktop remains to be seen but, already, advocates for the open source OS are clamoring to explain why now - not in times past - the moment is right for enterprise-level corporations to begin migrating to Linux.

"The advantage of embedded Linux is that it's a royalty-free, open source, compact solution that provides a strong foundation for an ever-growing base of applications to run on. Linux is a fully functional operating system, with support for a variety of file-handling protocols, network protocols, devices - a very important requirement in embedded systems because of the need to 'compute anywhere, anytime'. It is modular in nature and is easy to slim down by removing utility programs, tools, and other system services that are not needed in an embedded environment."

"For desktop users, monitoring resource usage is an important task. By doing this, we can locate system bottlenecks, plan what to do to optimize our system, identify memory leaks, and so on. The problem is which software one should use and how to use it according to our needs. Among many monitoring tools that are available, most people use 'top'. Top provides almost everything we need to monitor our system's resource usage within a single shot. In this article, all the information is based on procps 3.2.5 running on top of Linux kernel 2.6.x."

Virtual Appliances, a maker of nano-sized virtual machines for VMWare, announced their first release last week, an NFS/SMB to web server appliance for VMWare. Their base model is a 15MB download. The appliance is based on Gentoo Linux and is free to use.

"Free open source software is making slow in-roads into the world of big box retail. This article is the first of a series of two Mad Penguin articles which take a detailed look inside the world of retail as Tux is experiencing it. Today, in Section One Mad Penguin goes shopping to see what can be seen in four retail big box stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, complete with short videos inside some of those stores for the purpose of providing a wee bit of context."

"Need a teeny-tiny, business-card-sized, open source operating system that squeezes a lot of software into a little space? Take a look at DSL Linux. This quick review shows you how to use the miniscule OS, highlights the on-board applications, details how to load and start it, and explains how to save between sessions when using a bootable CD."

Mepis LLC, a long-time Debian Linux distributor, is switching from Debian to Ubuntu as the basis for its SimplyMEPIS Linux distribution. It seems MEPIS founder Warren Woodford has decided that MEPIS will do better for its users by depending upon Ubuntu, rather than Debian, for its foundation.

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.16 today. "Not a lot of changes since -rc6, but there's various random one-liners here and there (a number of Coverity bugs found, for example), and there are small MIPS and PowerPC updates. It looks like both Fedora and SuSE end up using a kernel that is pretty close to this 2.6.16 release, so let's all hope it's good. Give it a good testing, please."